Russians list KGB victims

Tuesday

Oct 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMOct 30, 2012 at 11:15 AM

MOSCOW - The muddy slush numbed the feet. Voices trembled, not because of the freezing cold but because of the weight of their words. Russians gathered yesterday in the shadow of the building where Stalin's secret police drew up their death lists and spoke the names of the murdered.

MOSCOW — The muddy slush numbed the feet. Voices trembled, not because of the freezing cold but because of the weight of their words. Russians gathered yesterday in the shadow of the building where Stalin’s secret police drew up their death lists and spoke the names of the murdered.

Members of the Memorial human-rights society, relatives of victims and others come here once a year to stand near the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the White Sea island where the Soviets organized their first prison camp in 1923, and read from a list of the 30,000 Muscovites executed in 1937 and 1938.

This year, the reading had more than the usual resonance. Opponents of President Vladimir Putin have been saying that his crackdown on political opposition reminds them of those two years, the worst of Stalin’s terror, when 1.7?million Russians were arrested and at least 725,000 of them shot. Others were sent to the gulag.

Vladimir Kantovsky, an 89-year-old survivor of the camps, read four names of the dead and placed a candle next to the stone.

He pointed across the square to the Lubyanka, now the home of the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB. “There were guards there with knives,” he said. “People wouldn’t even walk near the building, they were so terrified.”

Kantovsky said it was more important than ever to read the names: “We must make people remember. We can’t let them forget. If they do, it can happen again.”

Memorial organized the first reading in 2007, the 70th anniversary of the terror. The names are read on the eve of Oct. 30, the day set aside to remember victims of political repression. The names, along with the person’s age, profession and date of execution, are read to defy a totalitarian system that tried to obliterate its victims. Relatives of the executed often did not know when they died or where they were buried.

“It is our duty to return their names to them,” said Yelena Zhemkova, Memorial’s executive director.

Memorial has been working for years to build a database of the victims of Soviet-era repression.

A 45-year-old village laborer, a 52-year-old employee of a brick factory, a 42-year-old accountant, a 40-year-old newspaper editor, a 22-year-old unemployed man. The reading began at 10 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m., still not enough time for every name.